The present invention relates generally to the field of modeling data, and more specifically, to modeling data as an undirected graph.
Retrieving sufficient insight from database data may be important to corporations. Today's database and content applications may construct sophisticated queries and provide results in a variety of views for satisfying business needs.
Today's data models include relational, XML and ER (Entity-Relationship) data models. The data models with their query languages have their various disadvantages.
With a relational model, logical concepts queried by users often may not map to the relational model's relations directly. The query and the result may be required to explicitly deal with inconsistencies between the logical view and physical relational record view and adjust their queries to be aligned with the relational model when querying and converting to a logical view when returning results.
An XML model may be designed for data that has inherent hierarchy and may be best suited for hierarchical data navigation. Such a model may be difficult to adapt to other query patterns without imposing significant query complexity.
ER data models have had some success in the system design area. The ER model may be overly complex to support simple and general purpose queries.
Hence, there is a need for a more efficient system and method for supporting a simplified entity relationship data model for simple and flexible query access to structured data.